Unless you’ve been living under the world’s biggest, soundproof rock for the last three years, you’re undoubtedly aware that artificial intelligence is all but mandatory if you aspire to any degree of entrepreneurial success. To be clear, you don’t have to build an AI-centered startup to be successful, but it does seem that failing to implement any of the rapidly-multiplying AI-enhanced tools out there will likely put you at a significant disadvantage.
If you read the title and have followed my lead here, you’re probably thinking you know where I’m going with this: We’ll all need to implement AI tools to stay competitive, which is going to gut our teams of all human roles, ruin the culture (and the economy, once 90% of people are unemployed), and bring us one step closer to the AI-pocalypse, right? I mean, if artificial intelligence can replace all our employees, can’t it replace us entrepreneurs and do a better job outcompeting us with AI-founded startups? Then everyone who isn’t an AI owner or programmer is broke and hopeless, right?
That rapid spiral into the AI-pocalypse isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it has little to do with the greatest looming problem that’s gotten no airtime to date. The inevitable downside I’m referring to highlights the unfortunate reality of the unavoidable clash between humans and computers (or machines, robots, whatever you want to call them). AI may be accelerating our progress in many aspects of the world, but there’s one thing this technology still can’t (and may not ever fully) control…
If this…
Before I delve into the consequence of the AI-ification of the startup world, let me first offer a brief deep dive into what AI is actually for (and what it isn’t). If you had to guess, what would you say is the number one strength of artificial intelligence in one word?
If you said anything other than speed or volume, you’re probably wrong in my book (though I’m open to debate on this, so feel free to challenge me in the comments). Simply put, though, the major benefit of employing artificial intelligence instead of human intelligence is the rate at which that intelligence can be used for productivity.
For example, let’s take marketing copy: With AI, you can write 100 or 1,000 (or more) email marketing funnels in the same time a human could manually write one, and the more powerful the AI, the more exponential that disparity of output. Okay, now that you’ve exponentially increased your productivity, what’s the implied result or outcome? You can stew on that for a bit.
Now that we’ve agreed AI is a productivity multiplier, is there anything else it exponentially improves? Perhaps quality or accuracy?
This is the first place humans employing AI go wrong. As a human who’s been employing AI pretty heavily among an array of different projects, tasks, and use cases over the past two or so years, I can assure you that while it may outperform humans in speed, I wouldn’t trust it to surpass them in quality or accuracy today. Why? Simple: AI is often being directed under the instruction of a human operator, and that person can in many ways cap the quality or accuracy of the AI-enhanced output.
This all goes back to the topic of prompt engineering: Garbage in, garbage out. Some AI can be very accurate and produce a higher quality output than its human guide could individually, but that human is still largely going to impact the quality and accuracy of that machine’s output with their instruction.
Why does all this matter? It all comes down to expectations versus reality, and it’s crucial that humans relying upon AI have clear expectations grounded in reality, rather than in hope and blissful ignorance. There’s one very common, very incorrect expectation poisoning the minds of countless entrepreneurs, and they’re blind to their blatantly obvious mistake. The mistake is grounded in logic and correlations, but it omits one crucial factor…
Then this.
Life (and business) is often a series of “if, then” statements, whereby the “if” is the thing we’re contemplating doing, and the “then” is the logical result. One reason every entrepreneur seems to be hopping on the AI bandwagon as fast as possible is, as I mentioned earlier, to remain competitive. If the competitors are using artificial intelligence in their business, then I must use it in mine in order to produce at the same speed and volume and thus, prevent getting outshined or losing market share to their exponentially larger, faster AI-enhanced operation. That’s a pretty normal, logical “if, then” conclusion, and I don’t think it’s wrong or rooted in baseless paranoia.
However, that’s not the “if, then” statement I’m worried about. Competitors are using AI; we know this. If we want to match or outpace their production, we likely need to use it, too. Fine.
The “if, then” statement I’m worried about has nothing to do with competitors, but everything to do with customers. Before dissecting the customer-AI clash, let’s debunk the most common assumption entrepreneurs make when they start employing AI tools in their business: If I employ AI into my [sales, marketing, operations, etc.], then I should enjoy AI-induced results.
For example, if I 1000x our marketing content output or sales productivity (cold calls, emails, etc.), then I should expect to see 1000x conversions, right?
Do you see the problem? Hint: There isn’t always a direct or linear correlation between effort (or productivity) and outcomes. In other words, just because you exponentially accelerate your productivity or efforts doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll enjoy exponentially accelerated results.
Why, though? This comes down to the one key caveat, also known as the human outlier, which AI enthusiasts seem to have forgotten still exists.
Speed was never the bottleneck.
If the only bottleneck to success in business was speed, then AI would be the obvious silver bullet solution to exponentially accelerating and increasing sales and profit. There’s a very simple, obvious, yet somehow overlooked reason why that just won’t work: As much as you can increase the volume of sales, marketing, or operational activity you execute, you can’t fully compensate for or take charge of the free will and unpredictable, uncontrollable nature of consumer behavior, also known as the human effect. This is where humans and machines clash, and there isn’t necessarily a clear winner.
Surprise: You can’t exponentially speed up a prospect-to-customer’s conversion timeline or emotional reaction by simply accelerating your rate or volume of marketing materials or product or service creation, launch, or operations! In other words, speed was never truly the bottleneck to startup growth or success! The AI-resistant wildcard of people (and human unpredictability) is still the bottleneck, but now we’re only getting more frustrated with human results due to our AI-skewed expectations.
Robot in, human out, operator confused
As entrepreneurs, we’d all love to run our businesses off a simple formula for growth and success, but most businesses aren’t all that simple. If they were, every entrepreneur would simply reinvest profits or pour fundraising capital into more marketing efforts and applaud as their ventures bloomed from 6 to 7 to 8 to 9 figures and beyond. There’s a reason that growth isn’t so simple, seamless, linear, risk-free, or predictable across the board, and AI is only exacerbating this issue by making us believe robot-level input begets robot-level output without considering the true decision-makers hindering that growth.
TLDR: AI-infused action conditions us to expect AI-accelerated and amplified results, but we neglect the fact that human interference is the very thing that determines business success. Machines don’t make most buying decisions, humans do, and those humans don’t operate at superhuman AI speeds just because your startup’s marketing activities or operations do.
Thus, the increasing influence and implementation of AI into our startups only broadens the vast gap between a founder’s expectations and the business results’ reality to follow, aggravating our disappointment and confusing our entrepreneurial plight. This is just one poignant example of how AI may seem to be improving, enhancing, or accelerating the entrepreneurial journey, but in some ways, it’s only increasing our unrealistic expectations and encouraging laziness, impatience, and founder frustration.
Just because we have AI on our side doesn’t mean we get to bypass the months or years of hustle, grind, tedium, nurturing prospects, and building our brand’s reputation into something prospects recognize, respect, and even seek out. Until AI is controlling human behavior, we’ll still need to accommodate the humans who currently make the world go round. So long as humans are paying our bills, they’re the ones calling the shots, and AI will need to take a back seat to what the people really want (and when)…
Source: www.medium.com
